There's No Such Thing as a Good Baby Toy

What they don’t tell you about parenting is that you’ll have to dedicate an entire day’s worth of effort—likely spread out over two weeks—cleaning up all the old baby toys once your kid outgrows them. I’ve realized after having done this that all these baby toys suck. None of them ever felt like they engaged the kid for more than five minutes at any time. You gave them the stacker like three or four months too early, and then spent those months trying to force the baby to learn how to operate this contraption while all the baby wanted to do was put the rings in their mouth.

One day, literally out of nowhere, you see the kid’s mind snap into place and now they’re interested, engaged, willing. The stacker is the most amazing toy of all time. Which uncredited female inventor designed this thing? Did you and your spouse create a little genius? Look at them go! Then they stop caring about the stacker just as suddenly and never touch it again. Now you’re putting it in storage, wondering if your future self will have the energy to wipe them down when they’re unpacked.

What I don’t like about baby toys is that they’re a parental illusion. The baby doesn’t care about the toy, we do. Babies would rather stick a spatula in the dog’s water bowl than sit on the Nugget being taught how to put together a clearly AI-generated dinosaur picture puzzle their grandparents gifted them. The illusion is when parents trick themselves into thinking that the toy is causing the kid to develop, when in reality, the development is allowing the kid to finally play with the toy.

The Child Development Industrial Complex wants to make you think you’re in control, but you’re not. Mother Nature is. That kid won’t put a circle in the circle hole until their brain gets to that point. We’re deluding ourselves if we think otherwise. Imagine the counterfactual; the child won’t develop the ability to match circles unless we teach them how to match circles. Does that sound right? No, of course the kid will inevitably figure it out, barring any legitimate disabilities. As a matter of fact, that’s kind of what toys actually function as: devices to monitor development, not drive it.

I grant that it’s possible baby toys and active play with a parent could help them hit a milestone sooner, but I don’t think you can shift this window by any significant developmental distance. A one-month-old is never going to match circles, but maybe you can get a kid to do it a week sooner than they otherwise would. In addition, I don’t think there’s any long-term positive consequences even if you did manage to slightly speed up development. What, now they get to match squares sooner?

The illusion is that we want to think our actions have positive long-term consequences. We’d like to believe that it’s not about matching shapes sooner, but somehow zapping their brain into spontaneously generating neurons that’ll help them become a doctor one day. In reality, if my kid is dumb, no amount of sitting on the floor and reminding them what sound a cow makes will ever change that. It’s not even about just IQ, either. Dumb kids can finally learn how to put the toy car down and pull it back to wind it up way sooner than kids who’ll get a doctorate.

Once you see enough kids go through all the stages, you realize that it’s just kind of happening on its own. Sometimes you’re shepherding it a little (e.g. helping them learn to walk) and other times they start doing stuff you forgot they needed to learn how to do without any input. We think we see patterns in the kids we watch grow, but that’s another illusion. We’re retrospectively rewriting the development story to match the development outcome. All those excited proclamations about how smart this baby is get memoryholed the moment this baby grows up to flunk out of high school. All those hushed whispers about developmental delays are forgotten by the time that other baby flunks out of Yale.

The pattern we think we see is generated mostly by a correlation between the socio-cultural preferences of various layers of our society. People from college-educated, higher-income demographic segments pass their High Quality People Juices down to their kids, who grow up to also be pretty successful in life. Those people happen to spend a decent chunk of their expendable income buying wooden toys in muted colors from Target. More importantly, they have a cultural belief that a parent must invest lots of time and energy into their child out of a false impression that the investment will pay dividends.

When two doctors procreate, that kid is likely to do well in life. Not because the doctors did something super special to make their kid successful, but because the kid is made of two doctors. We’re stitching the doctors’ DNA strands together into a new person, folks. What’d you think was gonna come out the other side, an elephant? No, it’s actually pretty likely to be another doctor. Now, the doctors think that it was something they did, but if you could hop in a time machine and switch literally every toy that baby ever had to a totally different one, there would be no difference in outcome. Shit, you could take all their toys away entirely and that kid might still pass the MCAT.

Imagine this: instead of the bougie part of society buying pastel-color wood nonsense and the poors buying colorful plastic crap, it’s the other way around. Now the doctors are giving their kid Walmart Fisher Price and the trailer park family just built a play kitchen. Now what? The trailer parents finally play with their kid and that kid never experiences his car getting repossessed? These are aesthetic preferences that have absolutely no impact on how any child grows up. It’s like believing that Tapout shirts create douchebags, but in reverse.

Back in Ye Olden Days, upper class parents barely interacted with their kid. There was a wet nurse to feed, a governess to change diapers, and the dad wouldn’t look his son in the eye until that boy came back from the same boarding school his great-grandfather attended. Those absentee fathers were lawyers and politicians, and their sons somehow went on to become lawyers and politicians despite never having been shown high-contrast black-and-white cards at two weeks of age. Once you’ve accounted for a healthy diet and an absence of abuse, we’re working with teeny tiny margins. The toys we buy serve as a placebo for us, the parents, placating our innate worries about our kids’ future.

Look, I really want it to be true that there’s a Lovevery toy that could grow me a child who doesn’t insist that they’re starving the moment it’s time to brush their teeth before bed. But that’s the thing; they’re all doing that at a certain age, regardless of what kind of toys their parents did or did not play with them, because development is happening on its own. What’s really happening when we choose to buy expensive wood toys is trying to spend our way out of our neuroses about microplastics. We’re purchasing a position in the societal marketplace among people like ourselves, adopting those cultural preferences, before having to figure out how to get rid of all this crap a couple months later.

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